Disparate Forces Align Over Affordable Rents

Video

Residents who have long called Crown Heights home are hoping their complaints against lackluster landlords will go further if they join forces with tenants who have just moved in.Published OnApril 28, 2014CreditImage by Channon Hodge/The New York Times

The letter came in the dead of winter, dated Jan. 29. In a written “notice of termination,” Toussaint Wortham’s landlord accused him of violating his lease by making some renovations in his kitchen, and telling him that he had two weeks to leave the rent-stabilized apartment he had lived in for more than 30 years.

A few weeks later, Mr. Wortham said, his rent check was returned; his landlord had refused to accept it. Then, he said, the building’s manager offered to buy him out of the unit if he agreed to vacate for good. After he refused, he was served with court papers.

Mr. Wortham, 39, contends that the new set of cabinets he installed more than five years earlier was not the impetus for his landlord’s action. The real problem was his rent; at $859 a month, it is far less than what the three-bedroom apartment would command at market rate in his increasingly popular Brooklyn neighborhood. Rather than call a lawyer, Mr. Wortham turned to a group called the Crown Heights Tenant Union.

Founded by a handful of young Occupy Wall Street veterans last summer, the Crown Heights Tenant Union is one of the most effective groups at dealing with issues raised by the rapid gentrification of the neighborhood, just east of Prospect Park. It has organized tenants in some 20 buildings, to combat what the group says are patterns of abuse directed at residents like Mr. Wortham, who live in the area’s many rent-regulated apartments.

Struggles between tenants and landlords are nothing new, but this one has a twist: Fueled by the influx of a new generation of socially conscious recent college graduates, most of whom, unlike Mr. Wortham, have only lived in the neighborhood for a couple of years, the group is challenging the stereotypes that pit long-term residents against newer ones, which are often drawn along racial and class lines, in the struggle over gentrification.

Image

Sterling Place in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. The neighborhood, which is east of Prospect Park, has become increasingly popular.CreditKirsten Luce for The New York Times

“It’s pretty unique,” said Kerri White, an organizer with the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board, which, along with the Pratt Area Community Council, is one of the seasoned advocacy groups that has joined forces with the Tenant Union. “Because the rate of gentrification in Crown Heights is happening so rapidly, it really does put the spectrum of tenants together.”

Crown Heights, the group’s organizers say, is a perfect storm of housing issues, where regulated apartments can rent for as little as half of what they could garner at market rates. According to advocates, the area has also been disproportionately affected by the return of what they call “predatory equity,” where private equity firms acquire buildings with a high percentage of rent-regulated units and a business plan to convert those units to market rate rentals.

The Tenant Union hopes that by organizing tenants, educating them about their rights and streamlining information about the city’s arcane housing laws, it will be able to help fend off landlords who aggressively, and at times, the group says, illegally, try to clear rent-stabilized units of their long-term residents.

The group’s position is that the harassment used to clear longstanding tenants from apartments to make way for more affluent young adults like themselves, who are often willing to pay much more for apartments, is a cycle of exploitation.

Older residents get displaced from rent-stabilized apartments by landlords who harass them into buyouts, neglect to make repairs or stop accepting their rent checks, the group says. Landlords then might overcharge subsequent tenants by illegally inflating rent on what is still, in many cases, a rent-stabilized unit. According to the group’s logic, breaking this cycle would make life easier for the area’s longtime residents, while keeping rents lower for newcomers like themselves, many of whom are earning entry-level professional wages.

Some landlords in the area dispute the accounts of tenants in the union. A man who identified himself as Kenneth Rosenblum, one of the owners of Mr. Wortham’s building, acknowledged that he was currently in court with Mr. Wortham amid eviction proceedings. “He did something which was wrong. He has to take responsibility for his conduct,” said Mr. Rosenblum. “The court will be the one that makes that decision.”

Mr. Rosenblum rejected the notion that he would try to push out a rent-stabilized tenant. “We have these existing tenants who have asked us and we have put in new kitchens, new baths, whatever anyone wants,” he said. “We are there to be of service.”

Image

Nicole Carty is one of the organizers of the Crown Heights Tenant Union and a veteran of the Occupy Wall Street movement.CreditKirsten Luce for The New York Times

Other groups have tried to organize in Crown Heights but have been less effective. The Crown Heights Assembly, for example, gained attention in 2013 for sticker-bombing buildings and loudly protesting against a local brokerage’s procedures. The brokerage responded by filing a $31 million lawsuit against the assembly.

Organizers say the Crown Heights Tenant Union has found success where the Crown Heights Assembly and Occupy Wall Street did not by focusing more on inclusion. “For whatever reason, this is really working,” said Nicole Carty, 25, a recent graduate of Brown University and a former facilitator with the Occupy movement, who helped found the group last summer.

The union has delivered a list of demands to various landlords in the area. Modeled on collective bargaining agreements, the list calls for, among other things, a five-year rent freeze, a right to timely repairs and an “an end to the cycle of displacement.” They say their message is taking root with some in their intended audience: the landlords of a building on Union Street where they held a small protest have started making more repairs to currently occupied apartments and stopped renovating vacant ones, according to organizers.

The rally on Union Street drew more than 50 neighborhood residents. Letitia James, the city’s public advocate, recently sent a staff member to meet with the group. They are also working closely with South Brooklyn Legal Services to help connect tenants to attorneys. The group’s organizers say they are reaching around 500 tenants, and that about 80 are regularly involved.

One of these is Heather Ifill, 62, who says her landlord won’t make timely repairs to the rent-stabilized one-bedroom she rents for about $800 a month. She claims it took more than two months for her bathroom ceiling to be fixed after a part of it collapsed last summer. Ms. Ifill, who learned of the group from a flyer posted in her St. Marks Avenue building, says she doesn’t think there’s anything hypocritical about the area’s new residents trying to help out its older ones.

“I’m glad that somebody is coming forward and trying to help the people in the area get through all of this,” she said.

She says she feels sympathy for some of them.

“If you come out here just starting out working, how can you pay the amount of money that they’re asking for?” she said. “Everybody deserves to live someplace. Everybody deserves to have a nice apartment.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A24 of the New York edition with the headline: Disparate Forces Align Over Affordable Rents. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe